A building management system is used to control and monitor a building or a part of a building, e.g. in functional buildings, hotels, office buildings, hospitals, apartment buildings etc.
The implementing or commissioning of a functional building or part of building, e.g. a hotel, an office-building complex, a hospital or a cinema follows normally a two-step approach.
In a first implementation step, all physical devices, e.g. fieldbus devices, have to be configured with dedicated application parameters and data points for establishing communication to the bus system, which connects the devices of the building automation system. Depending on the underlying technologies, different tools have to be used to execute this implementing step.
The application parameters generally called configuration properties in a local operating network (LON) and parameters in KNX-standard. These are settings that are mainly kept in the persistent memory of devices. They are used to configure the way of working of a device, for instance of working for lights (dimming mode or on/off mode), fan coil device state as standalone, master, slave etc.
Data points generally called network variables in LON and group address in KNX. These are the values for instance will allow changing the temperature offset for a fan coil unit, e.g. a data point used to configure the temperature set point of a fan coil.
In a second implementation step, the visualization of the building has to be setup. Additional commissioning tools and releases are required, which exchange basic data functionalities with the tools the first step.
While in the first step all fieldbus devices have to be placed to their location inside the building, the second step requires the positioning of control elements inside a visual building topology. Currently both steps require manual work and are isolated and independent from each other. Import and export functions are provided to use the data exchange between the different commissioning tools, however during these steps information gets lost and has to be added once again.